This is all based on a false premise: that a partial install of Debian files is 'R'. R's own scripts do always install the HTML documentation, so help.start() is entitled to assume that it is present. (That is under Unix-alikes: R for Windows allows Compiled HTML rather than HTML, and so help.start makes appropriate tests). Note that your version of 'R' is not current. If there is a bug here, it is in the Debian re-packaging. I trust the Debian packages do contain a bug reporting address other than this one: please use the correct one. (The other binary distributions that I am aware of, e.g. RPMs, do seem to include all of R.)
On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 greg.kochanski at phonetics.oxford.ac.uk wrote:
Full_Name: Greg Kochanski Version: 2.2.0 OS: Debian Linux on i686 Submission from: (NULL) (212.159.16.190) Debian packages the R documentation separately from the R core code. Consequently, it is possible for people to have R without the HTML documentation. (In fact, the docs are not installed by default, so it's very likely.) Thus, help.start() cannot depend on the HTML documentation being there. It should check for one (or a few) files and produce some reasonable error message if it is not there. Maybe something like "Warning: the HTML documentation is not installed." Alternatively, help.start() could produce references to some on-line HTML documentation, instead of local documentation. A related bug is that if one calls help.start() when the HTML documentation does not exist, all future calls to help() will lead to errors.
Working as documented is not a bug.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595